#23 – Journey Mapping, Temkin Experience Ratings and Employee Satisfaction

 

Welcome to the 23rd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Customer Journey Mapping blog post
  2. Temkin Experience Ratings and Employee Satisfaction
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Looking forward

Some additional thoughts about Customer Journey Mapping

I sent you all a blog post on customer journey mapping last week. I have been surprised by the reactions to what I wrote. Since Sunday, the article has become the most visited page of all time on my website. Since I object to tracking in principle, I don’t know who has caused this happy phenomenon. I suspect a few influential people have simply forwarded the link to their friends and colleagues. Thank you, whoever you are.

I also posted the article on LinkedIn, and received some comments there. There seems to be general agreement that mapping every single customer-touching process is rarely a good use of resources. I feel I need to say a little more about when to use it. Once you have done your customer research and determined that something needs to be improved, journey mapping is a good way to start. Bain refer to the ‘something’ as a ‘customer episode’. An episode has a clear outcome. Rob Markey describes it well in a Net Promoter System podcast that was released this week on iTunes. He uses the example of what many of us would call a billing process. The way you should define the ‘episode’ is that a customer receives their bill. Use journey mapping to discover and describe everything that leads to the customer receiving the output of the process. This is entirely compatible with Lean Six Sigma methodology, for those who use it.

As with everything I write, I only claim to have more experience than most of you. I don’t usually claim that it is correct, except where I provide the supporting scientific evidence. My years of experience simply mean that you can avoid the mistakes I already made, and make some new ones of your own.

Employee Satisfaction vs. Temkin Experience Rating performance

Many of you will remember my study demonstrating that there is no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. I have to say that many of the reactions fell into the category of “Hey Maurice, my anecdotal experience outweighs your scientific evidence.” I used American Customer Satisfaction Index data, and matched it against Glassdoor employee ratings of their companies. Ever since then, I have been looking for other data sources. Temkin Group publishes the Temkin Experience Ratings for over 300 companies selling to US consumers. You can download a free report that includes partial data, including the scores for the top 50 and bottom 50 companies. I matched these scores to the Glassdoor employee ratings for the same companies. In short, there is almost no difference in employee ratings of the top and bottom companies. Once again, I don’t find this surprising. Employees can be happy with their pay, their commute to work and the food in the company restaurant without being being engaged, or doing anything positive for customers. Here is a table with the results. If you want me to write a full article on the topic, please let me know.

Temkin vs. Glassdoor

 

Our latest blog posts

The popular post on journey mapping is second on the list. The first entry is the first in a series of short true/false quizzes on the Net Promoter System. Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Kittens! And the Net Promoter System® Quiz – Part 1

Now that you have seen some kittens, it is time for the first in a series of true or false questions about the Net Promoter System. You can look forward to seven or eight short quizzes in all.

image Customer Journey mapping – Use with care, if at all

Journey Mapping is probably the most sophisticated and complete form of customer experience measurement and improvement. Perhaps too sophisticated. Read what follows and see what you think.

image Customer relationship research / surveys – Third of three articles

This is the third and final article in my series on deep relationship research, particularly for B2B. This one is about how to handle internal objections to implementing the whole interviewing and improvement process.

 

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Net Promoter System research – The ‘for and against’ list

Adam Ramshaw published this useful article on the Genroe site. It provides a list of academic and other studies about the relationship between NPS scores and revenue over time. While it is indeed useful, the majority of these studies, in all categories, are defective. The essential thing to know on the subject is that NPS trends compared to those of your main competitor are excellent predictors of market share. All of the studies seem to miss one or both of the points in red. Either no competitive comparison is made, or only revenue trends are discussed. One of the ‘against’ articles includes mention of the revenue trends of an unnamed Norwegian petrol/gas retailer, presumably the state monopoly, Statoil. The article considers NPS to be disproven because revenue did not rise in a period when the price of a barrel of oil went down substantially. Ridiculous. Anyway, Adam’s article is here.

CXpert: How to deal with a leadership team that isn’t CX oriented

No author is listed for this article on the Australian CXpert site. It provides useful suggestions for what you should when you have difficulty getting support for your customer experience efforts. The article is here.

 

Looking forward

The world of text analytics is in constant evolution. Even though it has just been few months since I wrote about the topic extensively in our book Net Promoter – Implement the System, there is more to say on the topic. I will probably write a new blog on text analytics next week.

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You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

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